At the Annual Meeting of the French Photographic Society held in Lyons
10–12 June 1895, Louis Lumière presented a series of short,
one-minute films to demonstrate the technical qualities of his recently
patented
cinématographe
, which was uniquely both a camera and a projector. In a varied programme
he not only showed the potential of his invention to record everyday
scenes both public (
La Sortie des Usines Lumière
) and private (
Le Goûter du Bébé
), but also, and ultimately of more momentous importance, established that
no obvious distinction could be made between these observed and
unrehearsed events, and an event stage-managed for the camera. With
Le Jardinier et le petit espiègle
, subsequently to become better known as
L'Arroseur arrosé
, Lumière created the first comic sequence to be recorded on film,
and in so doing heralded a generation of silent slapstick movies.

The film depicts a gardener innocently watering a vegetable patch, when a
mischievous boy surreptitiously cuts off the water supply by treading on
the hose. The bemused gardener looks down the nozzle of the hose to
determine the cause of the interruption, at which point the young
prankster releases the water. It then gushes up to soak the gardener and
to knock off his hat. After a short chase the boy is caught and duly
spanked, and the gardener resumes his task.

The origins of the film have been disputed. According to Lumière
the sequence is simply a re-enactment of an actual prank played by his
younger brother Edouard on the family gardener François Clerc.
However according to Georges Sadoul, the filmed sequence, if not the event
itself, may have been inspired by a well-known comic strip cartoon
frequently reproduced in late 19th-century children's books. He
cites as an example the cartoon strip composed by the artist Herman Vogel
and published in 1887 by Quantin. Here the narrative, illustrated in nine
images, is titled
L'Arroseur
, and relates precisely those events depicted in the film, so that the
cartoon sequence could easily be mistaken for the story-board for
Lumière's production. In this respect
L'Arroseur arrosé
may be considered the first example of screen adaptation.

The sequence was filmed at the family home in Lyons in the spring of 1895.
François Clerc duly played out his role as the gardener, but the
part of the boy was acted not by Edouard who was considered to be too
young, but by Daniel Duval, a juvenile apprentice carpenter at the
Lumière factory. A single fixed camera records the carefully staged
events.

In contrast to the other demonstration films which were no more than a
recorded fragment of a larger event,
L'Arroseur arrosé
is complete and self-contained. The simple cause and effect narrative,
presented from a single omniscient viewpoint, takes the audience through a
variety of emotions, in an expressive use of space. The opening frames
establish the gardener in his normal routine occupying the left-hand side
of the screen. This normality is subverted by the arrival from the right
of the mischievous boy who invades the gardener's space to
interrupt the water supply. The audience is now privileged with
information denied the gardener and can anticipate the comic outcome of
the unsuspecting victim looking down the hose.
However the audience is momentarily deprived of its omiscient viewpoint
when the gardener, clearly intent on retribution, chases the prankster out
of camera-shot. The two characters return now closer to the fixed camera
position so that the punishment of the naughty boy can be clearly seen.
With the closing images showing the gardener once more watering his
vegetable patch, and the guilty boy banished from the screen, normality
has been restored and traditional morality upheld.

Although Lumière made other comic sequences such as
Chez le photographe
and
Charcuterie mécanique
, it was
L'Arroseur arrosé
which captured the imagination of the early cinema audiences. The
sequence was quickly imitated by Georges Méliès with
L'Arroseur
in 1896, and in 1958 François Truffaut paid homage to
Lumière's pioneering achievements with an affectionate
pastiche of the gag in his film
Les Mistons.

—R. F. Cousins

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